On January 20th 2009, Barack Obama will be inaugarated as our nation’s 44th President. It will be history in the making as 5 million people descend on the mall and watch in rapture for what may be the most inspiring moment in the past 45 years of American history. A moment that will bend the knees of the strongest men and break the hearts of the hardest of humans. It will, in short, be the greatest moment of your life.

Until 12 days later. 12 days later, on February 1 2009, Superbowel 43 will take place in Tampa. On that day, the accomplishments of the junior Senator from Illinois who followed in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln will seem bookish, boring and banal. On that day something truly amazing could occur: Brett Favre could win the Superbowl, again.

Things have changed a lot in the mere fourteen months since I first called Ft. Greene, Brooklyn my home. Gnarly Vines, a wine shop catering to bookish, bespectacled white people, has opened across the street from neighborhood staple Crown Fried Chicken. A second Connecticut Muffin has added a decidedly more pronounced air of East Coast Elitism at the corner of Lafayette and Fulton. And a new Walgreens franchise has been erected on Myrtle and Clermont, promising to shake the foundations of pretty much every bodega in the surrounding ‘hood with its wide selection, competitive prices, and brand name comfort.

There’s one problem, though: the goddamn thing doesn’t look like it’s ever going to open. The construction of this particular Walgreens has been going on for just about a year now, and at the moment it’s been sitting there with its doors locked, seemingly completely stocked and ready to go, for at least two months at this point. As a bespectacled, bookish white person, I acknowledge the homogenization and the edging out of local authenticity that goes hand in hand with the increasing prevalence of chains, brands and franchises (and, let’s be honest, white people), but I’ve also been very much looking forward to not having to scour bodegas for a very specific brand of skin-rejuvenating, blackhead-preventing Neutrogena face wash, or walking twenty minutes to the Atlantic Target, only to find that everything’s out of stock, picked over, and generally out of sorts. So, over the course of the past year, I’ve accepted the Myrtle Ave. Walgreens into my conceptualization of the Ft. Greene landscape, and looked forward to the ease with which I would be able to stock up on my beautifying man-toiletries.

Welcome to our latest installment of how to write your favorite TV shows. Today we’re going to tackle the Jack-Liz relationship of the A plot of an episode of 30 Rock. It should be noted we have absolutely no qualifications to tell you how to write an episode of 30 Rock other than when you spend as much time as me sequestered in your apartment avoiding phone calls and ordering thai food you end up watching a lot of your favorite shows.

The key points to keep in mind to recreate an episode of 30 Rock on your home PC are these:

– Insert a political joke

– Insert a joke about pop culture

– Insert a joke about femininity*

* This final rule can be replaced with a joke about race, class or gender in general.

What’s it called when an unintentional visual comes together to serve as a metaphor out of nowhere? I suppose it’s the same principle that underlies every Pullitzer winning photograph – somehow, for some reason, this image means more than the sum of its parts.

Here, Sarah Palin, pardons a turkey then holds a press conference as an unlucky bird meets its fate in the background. The Republican facade of embracing the ethos of America’s small towns reached the absurd as what played out during the Palin press conference was straight out of Fargo, replete with the Don’tchyanose and wood chipped corpses. Happy Thanksiving.

Say what you will, but we here at MoJaMa spot some trends. A few weeks ago we crowded into some basement in Bushwick to watch a girl with a pixie haircut play acoustic guitar and croon aimlessly over it. Then a chick brought out her harmonium and growled some. Buddy next to me had just come in second to an R&B chick who belted some generic tune about love at a church coffeehouse and summed up the artiface of this whole indie music thing pretty well. “You learn three chords on a crazy instrument and you just yell over it,” he said. Yeah, sounds pretty right on. The music never matters. All that matters is how many bloggers hop on your bandwagon and declare you the next big thing.

So now it’s our turn. As I sat there watching these cats perform unplugged in this basement bar with carpet and mounted deer domes, it became pretty clear that the next big thing is just a dude plugging in his Tex Mex sunburned strat into a 16 watt Peavy and yelling nonsense. Not like Jeff Buckley. As me and Sadman know from a set we attended at the Living Room a few months ago, you can’t have Jeff Buckley as an influence without sounding like you have Jeff Buckley as an influence. I’m talking about skinny weirdos with a single guitar crooning in a way that’s so perposterous that you have no other choice but to wonder if he’s serious. He is, and so are we when we say shit’s gonna be big. Take what we say, add six months, and it’s like you’re talking to yourself in the future. Which is why when we say buy Adam Duritz boots right now, you should listen.

Thursday’s edition of the New York commuter newspaper, AM New York, had an installment in its Quality of Life series about rising crime during this slumping economy. The article focuses on high-crime hot spots like Staten Island’s 123rd Precinct and South Jamaica. Also in focus were rapidly gentrifying sections of the city, such as Fort Greene, where the slowing economy has exacerbated tensions between the haves and have nots who live in such proximity.

Though crime is still at historic lows in New York, the past year has seen growing concerns about an impending spike in violent crime rates. Not so long ago the New York Times canvased another area of rapid gentrification, Prospect Heights, about bubbling fears for public safety. Governor Patterson has projected massive budget shortfalls for the state and Mayor Bloomberg has already confirmed a decrease in the number of Police cadets who will be entering the academy. The future does indeed seem bleaker street for New York City, but who’s the real victim of this potential pending crime spree? The cool kids that seek out the hood for authenticity, of course.

Is it possible things could ever get too real for the kids from Wisconsin subletting a basement in a crack den somewhere in Bedstuy or is the danger of certain areas outweighed by just how completely totally over Williamsburg and Greenpointe are? Only time will tell, but no doubt the crowds of precocious college grads will keep coming in search of that Gossip Girl, How to Make it in America kind of world. Listen to the rantings of an actuary in Chicago over g-chat:

you need to change certain things to keep up with the trendiness of brooklyn

fuck all that

12:24 PM brroklyn is the fakest place on earth

right now

ya digg that?

Damn. Brooklyn faker than LA? No wonder Vinny Chase was seen wandering around aimlessly at the Adidas anniversary party on North 9th and Bedford last night.

If you want to be ahead of the curve, move to Chinatown. That’s where the cool cats will be moving next. ‘Cause Brooklyn’s done, and apparently too dangerous.